Create A Twitter Widget

How To Create A Twitter Widget for your WordPress Themes . Twitter needs no introduction.Wordpress Themes It has become the way to reach audiences for some people and companies and a place to hang out for others. Placing a Twitter feed on one’s website has almost become compulsory. Embedding a feed isn’t all that difficult if you are comfortable with Twitter’s default widget, but making your own will enable you to blend it into your website seamlessly.Wordpress Themes

The Result

The result of our effort will be a WordPress widget that can be placed in a widgetized sidebar. It will display the user’s details on top and the latest few items from the user’s feed. You can see it in action in our Musico theme, although the screenshot below says it all.Wordpress Themes

About The Twitter Terms Of Service

Because this is a custom widget, you control what and how elements are displayed. Make sure to read Twitter’s “Developer Display Requirements” to find out what you need to display. I will be breaking some of the rules for simplicity’s sake, but bolting on stuff will be a trivial matter once you’ve finished this article.Wordpress Themes

Note that conforming to the requirements is a must. If you do not, you run the risk of your ID being banned which means that your widget will not display any tweets.

First Step: Create A Twitter App

Before writing any code, we’ll have to get our hands on a Twitter app or, more appropriately, Twitter API credentials. The process is explained in a video that I made:

In case you prefer reading to watching a video, here are the basic steps:

Fill out the required fields, accept the rules of the road, and then click on the “Create your Twitter application” button. You will not need a callback URL for this app, so feel free to leave it blank.

Once the app has been created, click the “Create my access token” button.

You’re done! You will need the following data later on:

consumer key,

consumer secret,

access token,

access token secret.

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Add Our App’s Details

To add some options to our theme quickly, we’ll be using the theme customizer, introduced in WordPress 3.4. Smashing Magazine has an exhaustive article on it, if you’re interested to learn more. For now, we’ll just add the bare necessities.

Adding the code above to your theme’s functions.php file will generate a link to the customizer in the “Appearance” section of the admin area. To add some options, we’ll need to create a class. Add a file named MyCustomizer.class.php.

from : http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/06/27/create-twitter-widget/